New Burlington Street
This was the last street to be built on the estate,
c. 1735–9. The only houses of whose building
and history anything is known, beyond what
appears in the table on page 552, have been
demolished. Because of this, and of the high
degree of uniformity in the external appearance of
the street as first built, the architectural description
has not been given separately for individual
houses.
As will be mentioned below, what is known of
the original exteriors of the houses in this street
indicates a close correspondence between them
and the slightly earlier houses in Savile Row. This
was clearly the result of control by Lord Burlington. His architectural protege, Henry Flitcroft,
occurs as mortgagee of houses here (as in Savile
Row), but the only representative of Burlington
who is definitely known to have controlled the
character of an exterior is Daniel Garrett whose
'approbation' was required for the elevation of the
office wing at No. 10 in this street. (ref. 282) At No. 8,
no architect's supervision is mentioned in the
rough draft of the building agreement: the work
was examined and valued by Robert Morris. The
kitchen, back kitchen and vaults here were
specified to be built like those at No. 5 Savile
Row. (ref. 283) <Leoni was the architect of No. 4.>
(fn. a)
Like the other main streets on the estate, New
Burlington Street was intended for residential
occupation by people of substance. But at No.
11 the house was used for five years or more, (ref. 24)
before being taken by the first residential occupant,
as a place of refreshment known as Burlington
Coffee House or Fisher's Coffee House after its
proprietor Robert Fisher. (ref. 284)
Perhaps the most interesting house in the street
was No. 5. Its exterior conformed to that of its
neighbours but its interior was one of the very few
known to have been designed for a town house by
Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was a late work undertaken only a year or so before his death in 1736.
Details of the interior survive in a conveyancer's
formulary-book in the British Museum recording
an agreement of 1735 between the builders and the
first occupant of the house, for the work to be
carried out according to Hawksmoor's specifications. (ref. 285) (ref. b) The evidence of the architectural
character of the interior is discussed below. There
is no evidence of the circumstances in which a
design by so idiosyncratic an artist of an earlier
generation was executed behind a Burlingtonian
façade of the 1730's. The intending owner,
however, was the Dowager Viscountess Irwin, a
daughter of the third Earl of Carlisle, for whom
Hawksmoor was designing the Mausoleum at
Castle Howard. Hawksmoor had drawn a
chimneypiece for her, probably in a room at
Castle Howard, in 1727 (ref. 286) and had since maintained an acquaintance. (ref. 287) Whether Hawksmoor
was subjected here to the same criticisms in the
cause of Burlingtonian Palladianism that he
suffered at Castle Howard does not appear. The
requirement in the builders' specifications that the
work should be 'in Taste (as ye term now is)' was,
however, no doubt of the aged architect's drafting,
and possibly reveals some exasperation on his part.
Hawksmoor had a reputation for sound construction and his concern for this perhaps shows in
the requirement that 'the Chimney Funnels of ye
sd house shall be made sufficiently wide for a
Chimney Sweepers boy to go up within in order
to Sweep them' and that their brickwork should
be thick enough 'to prevent the wainscott from
being fired or burnt'. It was also provided that
'the Kitchen shall be plaistered with a good
Ceiling somewhat thicker than common in order
to keep the steam and smell of the Rooms below
from offending the rooms above'.
The agreement was made by Lady Irwin with
the builders Gray and Fortnam, who had already
come to an agreement for the site with Burlington
in August 1734. (ref. 288) They now, in 1735, undertook to procure a building lease to be made by
Burlington to her (which was done by lease dated
in January 1735/6). (ref. 288) They undertook to have
all the builders' work, apart from the carpenter's
and joiner's, completed by September 1736 at a
cost of £1040. A separate agreement was made
by Lady Irwin with Thomas Knight for the
execution of the carpenter's and joiner's work at a
cost of £530. The finishing of the house was
thus to cost her £1578 in addition to Hawksmoor's fee. She bought the freehold of the site on
2–3 February 1736/7, (ref. 289) and a day or two later
wrote to her father that her house was 'now
within a tew weeks of being finished and I think
a pretty House it will prove of the size.' She
went on to speak of an important decorative
feature, associated with the work at her father's
house: 'I have executed the ceiling I brought
from Castle Howard drawn by your Italian, & it
looks very magnificent & fine and is allowed by
those we have seen it to be as handsome a ceiling
as is in town'. It is not known if this was a design by
Pellegrini, who painted ceilings at Castle Howard,
nor is it known who was responsible for its execution in New Burlington Street. In the same letter
Lady Irwin mentions the 'alarm & difficulty'
caused her at this late stage of the work by the
bankruptcy of Thomas Knight: 'my head
Carpenter who performed all my joyners work is
broke & undone, he has performed up more work
for me than I have yet paid him, but the statue of
Bankrupsey is so severe upon those yt pay money
in their own wrong yt I have been under a good
deal of uneasiness how to proceed in the finishing
my House.' (ref. 290) In June of that year Lady Irwin,
against her father's wishes, married her second
husband, Colonel William Douglas. A gossip
reported: 'they say he is a very handsome man,
very covetous and very positive and does already
find great fault with her laying out too much
money upon her House, and in her Dress'. (ref. 291)
A later occupant was Martin Tupper whose
father, Doctor Tupper, took the house in 1825, (ref. 292)
and who lived here until 1845. From 1848 until
1869 the house was the headquarters of the Royal
Asiatic Society.
Architectural Description of New Burlington Street
The street is now of very little architectural
interest. The western end has been swallowed up
by the return fronts of buildings in Savile Row, and
most of the sites which remain are occupied by
unimportant buildings dating approximately from
the first three decades of the twentieth century.
With one exception, however, these buildings
preserve the original narrow frontages, so that the
scale of the street is not entirely lost.
Two houses on the north side, Nos. 1 and 2,
are older than the rest and it is clear from comparison with photographs of 1898 (ref. 293) and 1913, (ref. 294)
showing the former Nos. 3–5 and 12–16 (consec.),
that these are the much altered remains of the
original development. In the copy of the builders'
agreements of 1735 concerning No. 5, it is
stipulated that 'the form and manner of the front
next the Street shall be Conformable to the other
fronts in the said Street as agreed to and with ye
sd Earl of Burln'
(ref. 295) and this seems to have been
adhered to rigidly, not only in New Burlington
Street but also in Savile Row, where almost
identical houses may still be seen. Although the
designer of this standard elevation is not known,
it is worth noting its close similarity to that of
Nos. 9 and 10 St. James's Square, built in 1736, (ref. 296)
particularly because of the appearance of Henry
Flitcroft, the architect, as mortgagee of Nos. I and
16 New Burlington Street and of Nos. 11 and 18
Savile Row.
Each of the houses illustrated in these photographs contained a basement, three storeys and a
garret, except where extra storeys had been added,
and had a brick front three or possibly, at Nos. 4
and 5 (for which there is no photograph showing
the complete front), four windows wide. The
colour of the brickwork is now only discernible in
the back wall of No. 2, where it is a reddish
brown, but perhaps this was what the builders'
agreements for Nos. 5 and 8 (ref. 297) meant when they
specified 'grey stocks' for both front and back
walls (as at St. Peter's, Vere Street, in 1724 (ref. 298) ).
The rather narrow windows had flat gauged
arches and stone sills, while the doorway had a
moulded stone architrave with a cornice on consoles above. The doorway of No. 5 was to have
had two stone obelisks for lamps 'like those done
in the same Street'. (ref. 295) A broad stone bandcourse
finished the ground storey and there were continued sills in the second storey, suggesting a
pedestal-course. The front was carried up to
form a parapet with a stone coping, below which
was a moulded stone cornice continued from house
to house. At No. 5 the roof was to have had
'pedament windows as in the other Houses'. (ref. 299)
Some of these features can still be seen at Nos. 1
and 2. No. 1 has been heightened by two storeys
since 1836, (ref. 112) its ground storey completely
altered in quite modern times and its brickwork
painted red, but the crowning cornice remains and
so do the continued sills in the second storey, although the windows have been lengthened. No. 2
has been heightened by one storey (also since
1836) (ref. 112) and its front resurfaced a dark grey,
uniform dressings in cement having been added in
early nineteenth-century style. The crowning
cornice survives, but there is no bandcourse above
the ground storey nor continued sills in the second
storey. The architrave to the western doorway is
perhaps original but probably not the cornice or
the consoles above.
There is no evidence to suggest that any uniformity was enforced in the interiors of the
houses. No. 1 has been entirely altered internally,
but at No. 2 some features are still distinguishable
and these can be related to details given in an
auctioneer's notice of 1793. (ref. 300) The first three
floors each had two rooms, consisting of dining
and breakfast parlours on the ground floor,
drawing-rooms on the first (or principal) floor and
bedrooms with closets on the second floor, the
garrets being given over to three chambers for
servants. A single staircase of stone served the
whole building and existing evidence suggests that
it was placed in the middle of the house with a
room in front of and behind it. Complete original
cornices remain in the entrance passage, the firstfloor back room and the second-floor front room,
and part of one on the first-floor landing. The
cornices are all enriched modillioned ones of
plaster except for that on the second floor which,
though apparently of plaster, resembles an enriched box-cornice. The housekeeper's room,
servants' hall, kitchen and scullery were in the
basement, and in the court-yard at the back was a
detached stable building containing a double
coach-house, stabling for six horses and accommodation for the coachman.
For the interior of No. 3 there is the evidence
of an engraving, published by Isaac Ware in
1756, (ref. 301) showing 'a drawing room at Richard
Chandler's, Esq; Burlington Gardens' (as the
estate in general was often designated) (Plate 110).
The three walls which are illustrated have a plain
dado in the lower part and in the upper part either
sunk panels or flush panels defined by an eared
architrave-moulding, the margin of the ceiling
having a modillioned cornice. The sunk panels
have carved frames and are filled with ornament
in high relief while the flush panels are embellished
with swags and scallops, being finished with a
cornice. The doors, one at each end of the wall
opposite the windows, have moulded architraves
surmounted by carved pulvinated friezes and
moulded cornices. There is an extremely elaborate
chimneypiece composed of two caryatids supporting an entablature, the cornice being broken
forward in the centre over a carved plaque and
finished with a triangular pediment. Above this
is a panel for a picture, standing on a pedestal and
flanked by pilasters supporting a broken pediment.
It is possible to reconstruct Hawksmoor's
original interior of No. 5 in some detail from the
builders' articles of agreement of 1735, (ref. 302) and
from a plan of the (altered) ground floor, made in
1934. (ref. 303) These show that, in addition to the plan,
some of the fittings were of his design, especially
the staircase and the chimneypiece. The staircase, for example, is described as being 'according
to a design and Directions' given by Hawksmoor.
Unlike No. 2 this house seems to have consisted
mostly of sleeping accommodation, the only two
living-rooms being on the ground floor. The
smaller living-room, designated the 'little parlour',
was at the front of the house, with the relatively
spacious entrance and staircase hall to the west of
it. At the back was a large 'Salon', fourteen feet
in height compared with the twelve feet of the
parlour and with an area probably measuring
twenty-eight feet by twenty-one feet six inches.
The first floor had two bedrooms, but of the second
floor (referred to as the 'Attick') and the garret no
details are given. The kitchen and the housekeeper's room were in the basement and there
were gardens and a stable building at the back.
The main staircase, which appears to have
risen from the basement to the second floor, was of
stone, Purbeck in the basement and Portland
above. The steps were cantilevered out from the
walls of the hall and 'wrought with an Astragal on
ye Nose, and waved on ye underside', while the
balustrade, in both the ground and second storeys,
took the form of 'an iron Rail with Bars and
Scrowl Work mixed between' and had a mahogany
handrail. There is no mention of a secondary
staircase, nor is one shown on the plan, but for the
top of the house there were provided 'deal steps
to the winding stairs up to the garrets'. The hall
was paved with squares of Portland stone 'mix'd
with dots of black Marble' and there was a
Portland stone chimneypiece. The walls were
stuccoed and finished with a plaster cornice while
the ceiling was ornamented with 'a frame of Fret
work richly adorned, and the other parts of the
Ceiling decorated with Foliage, Fruit and other
ornaments'. In the parlour the walls were partly
wainscoted, but there were also hangings, and
there was a doorway with 'a Swelling Freize
leav'd, and the Cornice and pedament in Taste
and just proportion'. In the saloon 'There shall be
two Corinthian fluted Pillasters—including Bases
and Capitalls, the Basement of the Salon shall be
plain whole Deal work flush or even, being 3 ft
high including Base and Chaptering, exactly done
in Taste (as ye term now is)'. It is not clear how
the upper part of the walls below the entablature
was treated, although there is mention of 'Deal
Wainscot between the windows'. At the back of
the room was a bow window with a projection of
several feet, 'performed with portland stone in ye
Venetian style according to a Design given', and
with an enriched plaster ceiling. There were four
mahogany doors on this floor and in the saloon
mahogany shutters. The ceilings in both the
parlour and the saloon were 'ornamented with a
frame of Fretwork richly adorn'd, and the other
parts deck'd with Foliage and Ornaments: The
Entablamt round the said fore Roome shall be of
ye Ionick Order in the little parlour adorn'd with
a swelling Froize carv'd with Lawrell Leaves;
and the Entablature of the salon shall be Corinthian
fully Enriched'. The first-floor rooms are described in less specific terms, but they seem to have
been lined with deal wainscot and finished with
enriched plaster cornices, mention being made
also of '4 lonick fluted Pillasters' of wood.
The agreement does not indicate the position
of the ceiling of Italian design mentioned in Lady
Irwin's letter of February 1736/7.
The rough draft of the building agreement for
No. 8 (ref. 283) gives sufficient dimensions and other
details to form a fairly clear impression of the plan
and finishings. The ground and first floors
probably had a room front and back separated by
an unusually large staircase compartment, perhaps
some seventeen feet deep, this being entered from
the street by a passage about eight feet wide. On
the second floor the plan was the same except that
the front room was 'to be divided, as in ye Plan'
(no copy of which survives), and the back room
had 'an alcove for a bed'. The agreement gives
names only to the ground-floor rooms, which were
called the fore parlour and the back parlour, referring to the remainder simply as 'the fore room
up one pr of Stairs', and so on; possibly all the
upper rooms were bedrooms, as at No. 5.
The staircase was 'of Portland stone, wth Iron
rails, & wainscot hand rail', and was lit from
above. The upper part of the walls of the compartment was stuccoed, but below was a wooden
dado. The walls of the two parlours and the
entrance passage were furnished with a wooden
dado, but whereas the fore parlour had the upper
part of the walls panelled and a plain plaster
cornice above, the upper parts of the walls in the
back parlour and the passage were stuccoed, the
former having a dentilled cornice and the latter a
coved one. Both rooms had marble chimneypieces with carved wood surrounds, and the doorways had architraves, friezes and cornices, with
pediments in the back parlour. On the first floor
both rooms were completely panelled, although
the front room was more finely executed with
carved panels and a complete entablature of
plaster compared with the plain panels and plain
coved cornice of the back room. In each room
there was a marble chimneypiece with a carved
wood surround, and in the front room doorways
with carved architraves, friezes and pediments.
The walls of the second-floor rooms were stuccoed
above wooden dados and the chimneypieces were
of Portland stone. The house also had a Venetian
window, but its whereabouts is not specified.
At the end of the garden was a stable block
forming part of the mews now known as New
Burlington Place. The elevation of this block
towards the house had received architectural
treatment, having a pedimented Ionic portico of
wood and, above, '3 Blanks', presumably blind
windows, which were painted.
Some evidence has survived for the former No.
10, but not enough to permit a full reconstruction.
The house was altered for Sir John Griffin Griffin
(later fourth Lord Howard De Walden and first
Lord Braybrooke) by Robert and James Adam in
1778–9, (ref. 304) and the only record of its appearance
as built in 1735 is contained in a sketch appended
to the original lease. (ref. 282) Incidental information
about the Adams' work is provided by the accounts of John Hobcraft for the carpenter's and
joiner's work, (ref. 304) and some original Adam designs
for the ceilings, friezes and chimneypieces are
preserved in Sir John Soane's Museum. (ref. 305) There
is a photograph of 1939 (ref. 294) giving a distant view of
the Savile Row front and there are also plans of all
the floors, made in 1906, (ref. 306) although these are of
limited value since the house had been reconstructed again in 1864 (ref. 24) for a firm of wool
merchants. (ref. 115)
The house was brick-built, (ref. 306) containing, by
1906, a basement, four storeys and a garret.
It stood on the usual deep narrow plot, but with
the difference that its main front was on the long
New Burlington Street side which measured
ninety-two feet in breadth, leaving the house with
a depth of only thirty-five feet. Perhaps in order
to make the layout more manageable, and to avoid
monotony in the main elevation, the eastern end
of the building was treated as a slightly shallower
office wing, the main block thus being left with a
more proportionate frontage of sixty feet. Although the site was said in the original lease to
front on to Savile Row there is no evidence to
indicate that the main entrance was ever in that
street, and indeed this seems improbable since the
house was always shown under New Burlington
Street in the ratebooks.
The Savile Row front had three windows in
each storey and the New Burlington Street front
eight, five of these belonging to the main block.
The sketch of 1735 shows the main block with a
bandcourse above the ground storey and continued
sills in the second storey, as in the other original
houses in New Burlington Street and Savile Row.
The office wing was then set back slightly, both it
and the main block having relatively low groundstorey windows only 5 feet 8 inches in height, and
the space above filled with a small oblong panel.
Probably this device implies that one or more of
the ground-floor rooms had a deep coved ceiling
and in fact Hobcraft's accounts contain several
references to taking down such ceilings. The
1906 plans show that by that date the main block
had a slightly projecting centre three windows
wide, its central feature being a doorway with
flanking attached columns and side-lights, a
motif which was repeated in each of the upper
storeys by a wide three-light window. Perhaps it
was to the first-floor window that the 'Balconi to
Anti Room Window' mentioned in Hobcraft's
accounts belonged. Further documentary information about the exterior is lacking, but since
the front of the office wing was by 1906 flush with
that of the main block and there are references in
the accounts to 'stuf Us'd in Shoring up front of
the House' and 'attending Bricklayers setting out
front wall', it seems clear that substantial alterations were made by the Adams. In the photograph
of the Savile Row front the second- and thirdstorey windows are shown with architraves, friezes
and cornices, but these could have been added
during the reconstruction of 1864, since the brickwork had also been stuccoed and there was a
prominent Italianate cornice below the parapet.
The plans of 1906 are not very helpful in
reconstructing the eighteenth-century interior,
for by then the building was in use as a warehouse
and no doubt the position of the non-structural
walls had been altered. However the structural
walls show that the main block was divided into
two equal compartments having between them a
staircase hall which was fifteen feet wide and
extended the depth of the house, the eastern compartment being reduced in area by a light well.
The office wing was divided by a wall down its
spine, so that two long narrow compartments
were formed, the front one measuring sixteen feet
in depth and the back one ten feet. Although
various rooms are mentioned in Hobcraft's
accounts, none, apart from the staircase hall, can
be located on the plan. The drawing-room is,
however, described as being in the west front, and
there was a great parlour which had a door leading
into the hall, while the ante-room may have been
on the first floor above the front part of the hall.
Four rooms, the staircase hall, the drawingroom, the ante-room and Lady Griffin's dressingroom, figure most prominently in the accounts and
there are designs for all of them in the Adam
collection, together with the dining-room and the
'frontispiece'. It is clear that the staircase hall was
largely redesigned by the Adams. There are references to 'attending masons to staircases', 'moulds
for iron work to best stairs' and 'Mahogany Rail
to Stairs', while a new skylight with an 'eliptical
curb' was constructed. There was an alcove,
niches, 'Circular Cove Bracketing', and, on the
second floor, a screen with columns and pilasters
having '1½ Inch Diminish'd Shafts'. An interesting reference is to 'preparing Temporary Arch
and pilasters to fix up Under Stone landing to see
the Effect'. Evidently a porter's hall had been
contrived somewhere in the main hall, because
mention is made of 'fixing upright shores in
porter's hall on acct of masons putting up stone
landing'. The design for the 'hall' chimneypiece
shows flanking pilasters supporting an entablature,
in the centre of which is a plaque bearing a festooned urn. The staircase is shown at the back of
the hall in the 1906 plans, and although it was then
of wood the flight to the basement was of stone,
suggesting that this was the position of the Adam
staircase. The accounts mention the 'best staircase', but the plans show no secondary staircase.
The accounts give little information about the
drawing-room, except that it was to have hangings
on the walls. There are designs, though, for the
ceiling and the frieze. The former is an incomplete pen-and-ink sketch showing a square with a
narrow oblong at each end. A circle fills the
square and has in its centre a medallion enclosed
in turn by a cobweb pattern and interlaced strings
of flowers. The border of the circle consists of
anthemions enclosed in hoops and in the corners
of the square are oval medallions linked to the
circle by festoons. In the oblong panels are three
medallions alternating with pendents of flowers,
all of them hanging from festoons. The incomplete scale on the sketch suggests that the drawingroom must have occupied the whole of a compartment in the main block. The frieze is highly
elaborate with scallops under beaded arcs alternating with anthemions, the whole rising from a bed
of entwined C-scrolls. The other two ceiling
designs, both in colour, were for Lady Griffin's
dressing-room, one of them being marked 'not
executed'. Both were for roughly square rooms,
the executed one measuring 20 feet 5 inches
square, and both comprised a fairly simple pair of
concentric circles. In the executed design the
inner circle had a cobweb pattern with a sunflower
at its centre, while the outer circle had festoons
around its outer perimeter with smaller interlacing
festoons at the angles of the ceiling giving support
to an urn inside the circle. There was a frieze
consisting of alternating anthemions and lilies
springing from a bed of C-scrolls, and an ornate
chimneypiece with flanking pilasters and an
entablature, the pilasters decorated with ox-heads
and the frieze with C-scrolled urns, a centre
plaque bearing festoons and ox-heads. The anteroom and the 'frontispiece' had friezes of hoops
alternating with single flowers, and in the anteroom and the dining-room were chimneypieces
similar to the two described above.
The six early twentieth-century buildings in
the street are all office blocks with Portland stone
fronts, except for No. 14 which has a front of red
brick dressed with stone. No. 13, bearing the
date 1907, is Baroque in style with a canted bay
window projecting from the upper storeys, and
No. 14 is vaguely Georgian<it is still the eighteenth-century house>, but the rest are in the
austere classical style typical of commercial and
official buildings in the 1920's and early 1930's.
No. 4 is an early example of this style, built in
1912 by Niven and Wigglesworth. (ref. 307) Its fourstoreyed front elevation has a wide display window
in the ground storey with thick square columns
supporting an entablature, while the upper storeys
each have four windows with barred sashes. A
modillion cornice marks off the second and third
storeys as the principal stage and there are pilasters
between the windows in the attic storey. Apart
from the main cornice, elaborate carved decoration
is limited to ram-heads above the columns in the
ground storey and recessed panels above the
windows in the second storey.